May 2001
Robert Flynn Johnson
Curator in Charge, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums
of San Francisco
Helnwein catalogue, Robert Sandelson Gallery, London

HELNWEIN

The art of Gottfried Helnwein cannot be properly considered without surveying
the terrain of modern and contemporary art from which it developed. To understand
Helnwein is not just to see what movements and artists he embraced and was influenced
by, but also what he rejected. For Helnwein, creativity is not a vocation but
a mission. His art is the visual equivalent of a contact sport. It not only
has put Helnwein at odds with much of the history of post-war art, but also
has positioned him in the forefront of the highly regarded confrontationalist
movements of contemporary art so active in America and Europe today.

After World War Two, the tear glands of the world dried up from over-use. It
is this world for which Warhol is spokesman. Lucy R. Lippard, 1966

It is startling and disturbing to reflect that if one walks through the galleries
of major museums exhibiting art of the fifties, sixties, seventies, and even
into the eighties, there is a virtual dearth of art whose subject matter involves
an emotional response to the human condition or which comments on the major
social issues of the day. For those major painters and sculptors it is as if
the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights
movement did not exist. It is not that one would expect many to choose such
subjects but that virtually none did is noteworthy.

Of course, there were a number of artists who continued the crusade (which reached
its peak in the 1930s) to use art as a weapon of social activism. Artists like
Stanley Spencer, Ben Shahn, and Leon Golub created provocative work but they
were seen as peripheral to the avant-garde by critics, collectors, and museums
alike.

Europe, the scene of so much destruction and displacement during the century,
had a greater number of artists attuned to human values in their art than America.
In France, Picasso continued to utilise his canvas to mirror his psyche and
libido to the world. However, as passionate as he was, Picasso rarely allowed
his art to go beyond his own life as he did in the earlier monumental paintings
Guernica (1937) and The Charnel House (1945). The Swiss-born Alberto Giacommetti
created stark and unnerving images of man in his sculptures and paintings. Jean
Dubuffet drew as much inspiration from the art of the insane as real life in
his contorted comic personages. Germany and Austria in this period, however,
were marked by suppression, not expression in their art. Mannerists such as
Paul Wunderlich and Ernst Fuchs were in vogue but only the seemingly random
photorealism of Gerhard Richter and Franz Gertsch and the tormented expressionism
of Anselm Kiefer and Horst Janssen struck a truthful note.

One oasis of creativity, during this period, where deeply expressed ideas about
the nature of man existed was London. Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud were at
the forefront of a group of artists that eventually included Frank Auerbach,
Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, David Hockney,
and the expatriate American R.B. Kitaj.

In America, several popular artists made the odd detour into this area of expression.
Examples would be James Rosenquist's painting "F-111" (1969), Claus
Oldenberg's sculpture, "Lipstick (Ascending) On Caterpillar Tracks"
(1969) and Roy Lichtenstien's romance comic paintings such as "Drowning
Girl" (1963) which contain more parody than pathos. The two American artists
who most often utilized the headlines of the day were Robert Rauschenberg and
Andy Warhol. Concerning Rauschenberg, the potentially volatile use of photographic
images such as President Kennedy and NASA rockets was defused by their use for
purely aesthetic purposes. There is a skillful seductive look but no discernible
message beneath the virtuoso surface except that raw media can become high art.

Andy Warhol's images strike a deeper chord. Warhol realised that for his generation
(and generations to come?) the purpose of art was to replace the symbols of
an earlier devout and unchallenging age (Christ, The Virgin Mary, kings, queens,
and political leaders) with the practical and popular replacements of a shallower
era (Brando, Monroe, and other celebrities). Warhol's genius lay in his making
a physical reality out of a phenomenon that was already uneasily entering our
consciousness before his first silkscreen paintings ever existed; the notion
that nothing was sacred or profane anymore. Anything or anybody could and would
become art. Whim was more useful to Warhol than values. In retrospect, the banality
and irony of his vision made him the most brilliant yet soulless artist of his
era.

Grainy newspaper wire photos were the raw material of Warhol's vision. His subjects
included plane and automobile crashes, wanted criminals, electric chairs, race
riots, Jacqueline Kennedy in mourning, and women who died from consuming tainted
tuna fish. The one thing, however, that is consistent in all these works is
that Warhol professed no feelings one way or the other about the subjects at
hand. These potentially "hot" subjects have been desensitised of their
pathos. The bleached out photo imagery screened onto seemingly random coloured
backgrounds evoke neither approval nor dissent by Warhol. They are provocative
simply by existing as works of art.

An artist who seriously treated portraiture as the focus of his art was Chuck
Close. From the end of the sixties until today, despite having had to overcome
the effects of a stroke, Close has concentrated on the human face. As astounding
as these works are, evolving through a series of virtuoso styles, there is a
strangely unmoving quality about them. Something with the potential to engage
the viewer in human terms ends up conveying the impersonal identification of
a drivers' license photo.

The overly intellectual and formal aspects of most painting and sculpture from
the 1950s until the beginning of the 1980s was not shared in other areas of
culture. One need only mention, for example, the names of Henri Cartier Bresson,
Robert Frank, and Diane Arbus in photography; Roberto Rosselini, Elia Kazan,
and Michaelangelo Antononi in cinema; Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and
Harold Pinter in theatre; and James Baldwin, Gunter Grass, and John Updike in
literature who embraced and made the turmoil of human existence a focal point
of their art.

Something was brewing amongst visual artists that began in the sixties, took
hold during the 1970s, and only became a vital aspect of the avant-garde in
the 1980s. Theory, design, and decoration were no longer enough. Artists had
to break out of the supplicant to patron mode.

The artist's feelings became more important than the collector's appetite. The
result carried on by artists of widely diverse styles contained a pent up angry
"nothing to lose" attitude. The past, the present, the future, sex,
death, gender, politics, religion were all worthy of artistic scrutiny. The
desire for individualism and self-examination in art that flickered to life
in the late sixties has become a full-blown prairie fire of emotionally charged
art in the nineties. The career and the art of Gottfried Helnwein parallels
this course in the history of contemporary art.

I made a promise to myself to remember everything I saw; if someone should pluck
out my eyes, then I would retain the memory of all that I had seen for as long
as I lived. Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird

Artists are the visual, verbal, and audio guardians of our collective consciousness.
For example, few can remember the politics or history of 18th century Europe,
but the music of Mozart and the paintings of Watteau continue to be a source
of inspiration. We might not always like the message, but it is artists that
distil the essence of an era. They serve as thoughtful messengers to a sometimes
unperceptive present but an often receptive future.

In 1948 Gottfried Helnwein was born in Austria, a country that willingly had
embraced Nazi Germany. For decades after its defeat, the Austrian population
could not come to terms with the evil with which it had associated. The fervent
acceptance of the Anschluss was replaced by a sense of wounded denial in the
years after the war. It was in this dysfunctional society that Helnwein spent
his youth. Helnwein wrote of this time:

"My childhood was a horror - born right after the war, I lived in a world
of deep depression and unlimited boredom. All the grown-ups looked ugly and
devastated. I never saw anybody laughing and I never heard anybody sing. I always
felt I have landed in limbo. A two-dimensional world without colours, my real
life began when I got my first Mickey Mouse comic book from the Americans -
when I opened a three-dimensional world full of colours and wonders. My first
encounter with art was totally opposed to the torture art of the church. Very
early I started to research. I knew something had happened, but all the adults
were unable to talk about it. Nobody wanted to answer my questions. But I found
out what I wanted to know and I'm still finding out."

Gottfried Helnwein is an intelligent individual whose art is influenced, but
not overwhelmed, by his awareness of history, culture, and politics. As a young
man, his artistic energy needed to be encouraged, channelled, and refined. In
1969, with the support of the artist Rudolf Hausner, Helnwein was admitted to
the Vienna Academy of Art, the crucible of creativity in Vienna since the days
of Gustave Klimt and Egon Schiele. The four years that Helnwein spent there
were not for instruction, for he required and received little. It was for the
structure and the process. To work within one of the great ateliers, to interact
with fellow artists, and to see art as a vehicle for expression to a wider audience.
Helnwein wrote of this period: "When I started to paint in the first years,
I did not want to know anything about High Art and the art world. Different
than most artists I knew, for me it was never a matter of decoration, style,
or art reflecting and dealing with the problems of art. It was the politics,
society, history, media, news, that provoked, shocked, and motivated me and
the so called trivial world of comics, advertising and Rock and Roll. Art, for
me, was not only a way to explore the subject matter of war, violence, and society
but also a way to fight back - a way of resistance - of not agreeing with what
an oppressive, manipulating ruling society is trying to force on us. I felt
I could strike back with my pictures and force people to look at things they'd
rather forget."

It was during this period that Helnwein expanded his creative imagination into
the areas he is best known for today. The art of drawing and painting was and
is the bedrock of his art. However, Helnwein did not want to be confined or
categorised and felt free also to involve himself in photography. Further, he
wanted to take his art out into the streets, to confront the world with his
images and ideas. This form of art, now generally referred to as performance
art, was called "Aktions." In America, in the early sixties, it was
called "Happenings," but their true origin goes back to the early
days of the Dada movement in Switzerland, France, and Germany. Each of these
different artistic enthusiasms informed his art. A photograph would inspire
a watercolour. A painting would inspire an Aktion. Helnwein wrote of this period,
"In the beginning I was almost autistic... I didn't know about Richter,
Schwarzkogler, the Wiener Aktionism and all other works. Much later, in the
early eighties, I started to research and I was amazed to see how many connections
and similarities I found with other artists' works which emerged at approximately
the same time. However, there was no direct inspiration or influence."
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot, which the poet spends his life patiently
trying to untie. Jean Cocteau

A clarity of vision in his subject matter was emerging
in Helnwein's art that was to stay consistent throughout his career. His
subject matter was the human condition. The metaphor for his art, although
it included self-portraits, was dominated by the image of the child, but
not the carefree innocent child of popular imagination. Helnwein instead
created the profoundly disturbing yet compellingly provocative image of
the wounded child. The child scarred physically and the child scarred
emotionally from within.

In art history, before the end of the eighteenth century,
the child as an independent subject matter hardly existed. The child usually
appeared symbolically or allegorically as cupid, putti or angel. The child
also appeared as a miniature adult as in the depiction of young gods,
kings or, in Christianity , Jesus. This, however, was to change with the
advent of the Romantic movement in Europe. Around 1800, artists such as
William Blake, Louis Leopold Boilly, and Phillip Otto Runge (above left)
began to have children appear as individuals in their works, disconnected
from their previous symbolic baggage. The image of this now liberated
child was one that promised innocence, freedom, and curiosity. However,
now made mortal, there was also the necessary introduction of emotions,
sexuality, and the prospect of pain, suffering, and death.

There are a number of these earlier artists who were especially
meaningful to Helnwein in their portrayal of children. Among them were
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) with his adoration of feminine adolescence
(above left); Edvard Munch and his depiction of suffering and sexual awakening
(left); and Balthus (below left) with his preoccupation with secrets and
the erotic.

The children in these works have a knowing look in their
eyes. There was a sense of life experienced, both good and bad, which
made these works so intense and in their own day, so controversial. It
was apparent from the reception that these artists and others received,
however, that any derivation from the most bland representation of children
as innocents was cause for violent backlash from society. The public was
then, as it is now, very uncomfortable about showing the child as having
a sexual identity, however subtle, or as suffering in any way whether
physically or emotionally. Artists like Munch were willing to risk the
wrath of propriety in seeking out this un-explored area of human experience.
For Gottfried Helnwein, it became the major theme of his career.

How can a friendly person like Helnwein stand making his-excellent-painting
into a mirror of the terrors of this century? Or is it that he can't stand not
doing it? Does his mirror just reflect the attitude of the century? Heiner Müller

Looming out across a Helnwein canvas over twelve feet in length, Mickey Mouse,
1995, stares back at us. He is, at once, both benignly sweet and threateningly
sinister depending on your age and viewpoint. Helnwein has written, "what
do I associate with the name Disney? The inspiring sacred comics of my childhood,
that gave me a chance to escape from the cold Nazi-country into a world of joy
and wonder, or Michael Eisner's multi-billion dollar machine that smothers the
world." 8 The truth is, this image could represent both viewpoints, just
one, or neither. As Pablo Picasso once remarked, " a picture lives a life
like a living creature, undergoing the changes imposed on us by our life from
day to day. This is natural enough, as the picture lives only through the man
who is looking at it."

A flag painting by Jasper Johns is neither pattern nor patriotic. It is both
a beautiful act of pure painting but also an image pregnant with meaning because
of the symbolic nature of the subject matter. This is also true with Helnwein's
painting. Often overlooked in the discourse over the subject matter or meaning
of Helnwein's art is the appreciation of the compositional and painterly beauty
of his work. The technical virtuosity of his art makes acceptable certain images
that more crudely executed by others would be unbearable. "Mickey Mouse"
hovers between carefree and carnivorous in our consciousness. It is the unease
of our age that Helnwein has seized upon.

"Sunday's Child" (1972), is a disturbing tour de force of the young
Helnwein. It is a multi-layered vision convincing in its hyper-realism (notice
the beautifully rendered reflections of the apartment buildings in the window)
at odds with the absurdist fantasy of a knapsack toting duck with a popsicle.
Between these two competing tendencies appears an adolescent girl, the true
subject of the picture. She stands in winter coat and mittens in front of the
glass doors of a store festooned with the advertisements of mass consumerism.

On her arm is a cloth armband signifying that she is blind although it is clear
that she is not. In her hand is a large chocolate bar. Blood runs down her legs,
staining her tights. Is she bleeding from early menstruation or the result of
a sexual encounter (rape?) of which the chocolate is her reward or to buy her
silence? Her face is a contradiction. She sticks her tongue out to the viewer
with a smirk. Is it an innocent expression or a lascivious gesture?

Helnwein makes our mind swoon between the simply bizarre and the truly perverse.
What holds this outrageous work together is the painstaking detail of his watercolour
rendering and the baffling mystery of what it represents. Like many of Helnwein's
best works, it is a drama without narrative. Despite all its visual information,
it only raises questions, not answers them.

Tennessee Williams once said that all good art was an indiscretion. In Helnwein's
case, it is a confrontation. Since his earliest work, Helnwein has linked children
and pain. The wounded child has become his metaphor for the chaos of our emotionally
vacant world.

The writer Peter Gorsen wrote of Helnwein's work, "The child is the embodiment
of the innocent, defenceless, sacrificed individual at the mercy of brute force.
As an innocent, child of light, whose head and hand injuries emit light rays
like self-radiating stigmata, he is heroized into a sufferer and a saviour figure."
The wounds of Christ and the martyrdom of saints so often depicted in countless
paintings, sculptures, and car dashboard shrines no longer have the power to
shock. Despite our general indifference to general suffering in the world, the
thought or better yet, the image of a child in pain still gets through the emotional
defence mechanisms to our feelings. Helnwein understands this and exploits this
knowledge in his art.

"Beautiful Victim I", 1974 was inspired by a 1972 altered photograph
"Child of Light II", which was carefully arranged and posed by the
artist. The magic of this watercolour lies in its balancing of beauty and horror.
The work itself is subtle in colour with exquisite Vermeer-like light bathing
the exquisitely rendered outstretched body of the young girl. Contradicting
the peace is the shocking bandages and tubes that surround and obscure the child's
face. We are repelled and entranced at the same time. There is no explanation
for her wounds, no explanation for what she is doing on the floor. Helnwein's
aim is not to tell a story but to trigger a response.

"Beautiful Victim I", 1974, 53 cm x 73 cm, watercolor on cardboard

Helnwein has always been interested in photography as both a catalyst in his
painting and an end in itself. He has written, "I think photography is
the key medium for all artists who work in some kind of realistic manner. People
today perceive and know the world mainly through two-dimensional reproductions
and film. It's a highly manipulative media and I'm fascinated by its almost
unlimited possibilities to shift and twist the reality. When it looks like a
photograph people think it's real. So I always had the feeling a very photographical
image has more impact, more suggestive power."

Just as Helnwein creates paintings that appear photographic, in "Phoney
Death", circa 1990, he has created a photograph that takes on the composition
and scale of one of his paintings. The subject is both autobiographical and
symbolic. Helnwein uses the comic book as a symbol of freedom. As a child he
sought refuge in the escapist fantasy these comics delivered. Here this refuge,
although in the possession of the child, is denied. Because of her bandages,
her hands cannot turn the pages and her eyes cannot see. The starkness of the
child's white world is in contrast to the inviting colour and energy that the
comic book promises.

Helnwein has increasingly preferred to paint in grisaile (monochrome) utilising
a deep blue-black. (Another contemporary artist who employs this method is Mark
Tansey who usually opts for a brick red tonality in his works.) For Helnwein,
the restriction of colour to a single tone removes extraneous visual distractions
and focuses attention on the subject at hand. It also links his paintings with
photographic sources in an interesting way. A black and white photograph is
both extremely real in its technical ability to capture a moment in time and,
at the same time, completely false in that we do not live in a world purged
of colour. In his monochrome paintings, Helnwein has taken advantage of our
mind's photographic experience and expectations to create paintings that have
that same degree of reality/falsehood. "Night V (Phoney Death)", 1990
is a chilling revisiting of the wounded child whose bandages cut her off from
the world. In this case, however, the bandages might be a blessing. The only
light in the scene comes from a glowing television ... a source of information
and enlightenment but also a vehicle of propaganda, commercialisation and control.
On top of the television is a mechanical bank in the shape of a racially stereotyped
black man. Next to it is a sculpture that vaguely resembles the work that the
Nazi's put on the cover of the violently anti-Semitic Degenerate Art exhibition
catalogue in 1937. Behind the child reclines a beautiful yet unsmiling nude
woman of uncertain ethnic background. The scene resembles nothing so much as
a contemporary updating of the old master imagery of the torment and temptation
of Saint Anthony. The blinded child is surrounded by symbols of lust, commercialism
and prejudice...all vices of an adult world. The escapist comic book, even with
its implied violent subject matter of "Phoney Death" on its cover
is preferable to the alternative world that awaits this child.

We live in an age of euphemisms to cocoon ourselves from getting too close to
the truth. Bombs that kill civilians do not inflict casualties but only cause
"collateral damage." The greatest cause of unnatural disaster to humanity
over the centuries has not been the result of economic or nationalistic forces,
but by the inhumanity unleashed by organised religion on one group by another.
The use of brutality under the banner of religion is a profound perversion of
anything sacred. "Untitled" (Madonna and Child), 1994 is Helnwein's
response to the ethnic horrors unleashed in the Balkans since the dissolution
of Yugoslavia. Based on a painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Andrea
Mantegna (1431-1506), Helnwein has painstakingly replicated the composition
in monochrome, except for one telling detail. In the case of the Christ Child,
he has depicted the face as terribly disfigured and maimed. Helnwein is symbolically
confronting the hypocrisy of Christian Serbs who, while conducting their reign
of terror and murder, under the euphemism of "ethnic cleansing," maintained
that they were defending Christianity against the inroads of the Moslems. It
is history repeating itself and Helnwein utilises history to comment on the
latest failure of civilisation to be civilised.

"Anyone who sees and paints the sky green and pastures blue ought to be
sterilised." Adolf Hitler

This single sentence sums up the essence of the totalitarian mindset. The world
must adhere to an order of which no variation or independence is acceptable.
"Epiphany I", 1996 is from an important series of three paintings
created over a three-year period. This seamless stapling of a version of the
Adoration of the Magi into a scenario out of the Third Reich is in keeping with
Helnwein's desire to press the limits. Helnwein wrote, "In the Epiphany
trilogy, I refer directly to my (our) own historical background. The most significant
issue on the time track of the occident is Christianity and the male dominated
world of conquering and oppression. The constant slaughter of the "weak"-women,
children, the Jews, and other ethnic minorities, through holy wars, crusades
and the constant extermination of the inferior."

The apparent blasphemy of this scene of Nazi evil encountering the Madonna and
Child is not so clear cut in Helnwein's mind. It is a more symbolic case of
unconditional evil (the Third Reich) meeting conditional evil (the Catholic
Church). It takes on a further significance with the knowledge of the complicity
of Pope Pius XII, in matters of moral responsibility, with Germany during World
War Two. The surreal atmosphere within the picture is attributable to Helnwein
creating the veracity of a carefully composed news photo within a traditional
Renaissance composition.

There is a basic misconception that any given face at any given time looks more
or less the same: like a statue's face. Actually, the human face is as variable
from moment to moment as a screen on which images are reflected ... Gottfried
Helnwein's paintings and photographs attack this misconception showing the variety
of faces of which any face is capable. William S. Burroughs

For Helnwein, the nature of portraiture is not the mere artistic replication
of physiognomy or capturing the essence of a person's character. It is more
complex than that. Helnwein, like many other artists today such as Cindy Sherman,
Sally Mann, Christian Boltanski, Fang Lijun and Ron Mueck have shattered the
traditional sense of identity through formal portraiture and reassembled the
concept in a multitude of different styles and concepts.

In many of Helnwein's works, what at first glance appears to be the portrait
of an individual in truth comes to be seen as a more generalised conception.
This is true in "Untitled", 1996. The immediate reaction to the work
is one of mystery. Is the fragmentary depiction of the child's face simply caused
by shadow or is there no illusion? Is the face a fragment like some broken Egyptian
sculpture in the British Museum? Is the child depicted asleep as our subconscious
hopes or dead as our subconscious fears? Restricting the tonalities to a blue-black
pallor reinforces a mood of solemnity. Helnwein gives us enough information
to care, but not enough information to know.

Not content with a consistent artistic viewpoint, Helnwein creates a very different
dynamic in "Untitled", 1998. At first glance, Helnwein has created
a more straightforward portrait. It is in naturalistic colour executed with
photorealist precision. It is not a generalised conception but the specific
portrait of a beautifulyoung girl with blond hair and blue eyes. The work has
a luminosity inspired by the paintings of Georges de la Tour and Carravaggio.

Beyond the general attractiveness of the subject and the virtuosity of the execution
of the work, what makes us care? There is a quiet drama going on in this painting.
Her face comes out of darkness and is starkly and artificially lit. Her face
is partially in darkness, one eye in the shadow, the other distinct and staring
from the centre of the canvas. It is an unnerving picture. Although the girl
displays no distinct emotion, one has a sense of unspoken dialogue between subject
and viewer. There is knowledge and one could even project a subtle judgmental
quality to her stare. It is as if a youth were to say to an adult: "How
could you have screwed the world up so badly?" Ultimately, Helnwein's portraits
follow what Oscar Wilde perceptively observed, "Every portrait that is
painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."
I cannot bear the crying of children, but when my child cries I don't hear.
Anton Checkhov

Surprisingly, the works of Gottfried Helnwein have something in common with
the art of Alfred Hitchcock. Both often deal in suspense and mystery. Both often
deal with violence or the threat of violence. What is also true, however, is
that both deal in scenes leading up to violence or the aftermath of violence
but rarely the act of violence themselves. Like Hitchcock, Helnwein well aware
that stimulating the imagination of a viewer can create far greater drama than
a literal depiction.

In "Untitled", 1998 Helnwein has presented us
with an effect without knowledge of the cause. In his characteristic monochrome,
Helnwein has a young girl, naked except for a pair of panties, kneeling
upon a floor within a bare room. Her head is obscured by her hands that
cover her face in an implied gesture of grief, pain, or shame. The only
other piece of visual information in the work is a pail to the right of
the girl. Does the pail indicate a task forced upon the child à
la Cinderella? The image is haunting; the emotion of the child is undeniable,
yet the viewer is left to come to her or his own internal conclusions.

Viewing "Kiss I, 1998" is like visually eavesdropping
on a potentially explosive situation . . . or is it? Starkly lit within
a dark background, an adolescent girl in a blue dress stares out at us
as a woman, naked from the waist up, holds the girl as she kisses her.
Is this the prelude to a sexual assault? The erotic nature of the woman's
nakedness, the seemingly suggestive lifting of the girls dress by the
woman's right hand and the limp response of the girl to the kiss imply
the worst. But wait, could this not just be an act of tenderness by a
young mother to her daughter and the look of the child, the natural aversion
of adolescents to acts of affection? There is no answer from Helnwein.
For the answer, the viewer must look within himself or herself.

There are three things that cannot be seen, even though they may be right
in front of our eyes: the sun, genitals, and death. Georges Bataille

Until recently Helnwein has restricted himself to dealing with the child as
victim, wounded physically or mentally by a world it cannot comprehend or control.
Implicit in these works is that which logically follows suffering and pain in
the extreme is death. However, the subject of death has rarely appeared in Helnwein's
work until now. In the summer of 1999, Helnwein was commissioned to do a major
installation for the Dominikanerkirche in Krems, Austria. The installation,
entitled Apokalypse was a visual assault on the senses and the emotions. Besides
the three large canvases of the Epiphany Cycle 1996-98 and the painting Late
Regret 1997, Helnwein created four new series for this installation. The series
Angels Burning depicts, in garish colour, the faces of children as if severely
burned. Saints Silent, also in colour, depicts portraits of men grotesquely
disfigured as if from war wounds. Salved is a series, in monochromatic blue,
of men and boys both burned and disfigured. The final most monumental and clearly
disquieting of the series is Angels Sleeping, a group of photographs with painted
additions. The subject of these are fetuses floating in a stillborn liquid atmosphere
of which they will never emerge.

"Angel Sleeping I, 1999" was part of the installation and representative
of the whole. It is as heartbreaking as it is beautiful. This is not an image
from which one can get an intellectual distance such as Damien Hirst's The Physical
Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living that placed a shark in
formaldehyde. Helnwein's work is an image that was the beginning of a human
being, an individual with the prospects of feelings, aspirations, a future ...
now lost. In today's contemporary art, it carries a more pessimistic tone than
the oversized infant sculptures of the British artist Ron Mueck, but is less
cynical than Marcus Harvey's portrait of child murderer Myra Hindley made up
of what appear to be the imprints of children's hands. It is worth noting that
this work would surely be interpreted differently in the United States than
in Europe. For Americans, the image of a stillborn infant would be seen as a
symbol of the debate over the abortion issue ... the right to life movement
versus a woman's right to choose. The potential for polarisation is far from
the sense of universality that Helnwein intended with this work.

If Gottfried Helnwein were simply the skillful renderer of facile paintings,
drawings, and photographs without meaningful content (like so many practitioners
today) his art would not be of significance. If, in turn, Helnwein were an artist
bursting with original and provocative ideas without the skills to render those
ideas into meaningful art (also quite common in today's art world), he would
not merit the attention he deserves.

The fact, however, is that Gottfried Helnwein is the genuine article; a skilled
artist with a constantly evolving conscience that seeks release through his
art. A character in the 1976 film Network tells a vast television audience to
go to the window, open it up and shout, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going
to take it anymore!" Gottfried Helnwein shouts with his paintbrush.